Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday October 29, 2009 @03:36PM
from the napkins-and-a-digital-camera dept.

AdmiralXyz writes "I'm a university student, and I like to take notes on my (non-tablet) computer whenever possible, so it's easier to sort, categorize, and search through them later. Trouble is, I'm going into higher and higher math classes, and typing "f_X(x) = integral(-infinity, infinity, f(x,y) dy)" just isn't cutting it anymore: I need a way to get real-looking equations into my notes. I'm not particular about the details, the only requirement is that I need to keep up with the lecture, so it has to be fast, fast, fast. Straight LaTeX is way too slow, and Microsoft's Equation Editor isn't even worth mentioning. The platform is not a concern (I'm on a MacBook Pro and can run either Windows or Ubuntu in a virtual box if need be), but the less of a hit to battery life, the better. I've looked at several dedicated equation editing programs, but none of them, or their reviews, make any mention of speed. I've even thought about investing in a low-end Wacom tablet (does anyone know if there are ultra-cheap graphics tablets designed for non-artists?), but I figured I'd see if anyone at Slashdot has a better solution."

I have used LyX in advanced mathematical courses such as quantum mechanics and relativistic electrodynamics. With the help of the copy-paste function I found that I could type the equations faster into my laptop than my classmates could write them onto paper and so had a little more time to think about them and ask questions.

LyX is very easy to learn for note taking as you type stuff like:CNTL-M \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} \alpha(x) dxand get instant pretty graphical equations.

If you need to draw pictures, however, you will need a tablet or pen and paper.

I've found that, assuming your professor is okay with it, bringing a digital camera with a good zoom lens and shooting pictures of the board as the professor writes on it is the fastest way to take notes. We do this in meetings at work for the same reason. Alternatively, professors who use electronic slides can provide a copy of them electronically, removing the need to waste a lot of the students' time hand-writing copies of the same content unnecessarily. We don't live in ancient times; we aren't training scribes here.

That is entirely dependent on the individual and their learning style.

Some people do learn that way, some people do not, some people learn better by reading, or speaking or listening, or teaching others. Back in high school I used to program my calculator to do the problems on the homework and while I couldn't use those programs in class, explaining how to do something to the calculator generally gave me a pretty good understanding of it myself.

I second this. If you don't know TeX math commands, there are toolbar buttons, menus, and dialog boxes for everything. But once you do learn the commands (and the TeX commands are listed in the menus and appear as tooltips over the buttons), you can just type them. So instead of pressing the subscript button, you press _ and the display switches to subscript mode. Instead of clicking the sine function, you type \sin. Instead of clicking the fraction button, you can type \frac.

I wrote my thesis in LyX, and it was basically a good experience with few problems. However, if I was doing it again I'd probably use straight LaTeX via a nice editor (gedit has a nice LaTeX plugin, for example). The reason for this is that I think LaTeX is in someways a bit simpler than LyX because it is always clear what is happening, whereas LyX has a second markup stage. I had a bit of difficulty doing some document-wide formatting in LyX that I think would've been more straight-forward in LaTeX.

I'm certainly not being heavily critical of LyX, and think that if you stick to their bundled document formats, you should be fine.

(this is a little off-topic, because the article is about taking equation notes in class, which would be a cinch in LyX, I reckon.)

Even though we both have similar concepts of what the learning curve is referring to, I think the GP's interpretation is backwards, at least from a user interface design perspective. If the learning curve is steep, that means you learn a lot at the very beginning, which means that you have to learn a lot just to get started. Otherwise, you wouldn't have bothered to learn all that stuff up front. Thus, a steep learning curve means that the UI is relatively hard to learn, even if it doesn't take you a huge amount of time.

The ideal learning curve for software is actually fairly linear; the amount you learn at the beginning should be minimal because the UI should be discoverable enough and familiar enough (relative to other software) that you don't need to learn anything of substance to start using it at a basic level. As you get into it more, you should continue to discover things that make your life easier.

The learning curve has amount of time to make a single widget in the Y axis, and number of widgets made in the X axis.
It is good when that curve is steep, because that means improvement is fast. Even so, a learning curve that starts high is not that good, because it means you start off too slow,.
Either way, the important thing is that the curve drops to a small length of time per widget at the end. That's why GUIs are praised by those who "don't want to spend all their time learning esoteric commands" a

I'm more familiar with it being used in the sense as it refers to the curve you have to climb, hence a 'steep' learning curve has you start on ground level and then climb the face of El Capitan to get to the top. Wiki says it started your way, but current usage is more often the way I see it.

Maybe we should just drop the saying all together and stick with "easy to learn" and "complex to learn"?

Some people might think that. It really means that the jump is very sudden, regardless of how big it is. That said, by definition, most sudden jumps are big, or else we wouldn't perceive them as a jump, so that's not a particularly surprising interpretation. And in a relativistic sense, a quantum leap of an electron is fairly large... compared with the size of an atom, that is. Not huge, but certainly not tiny.

Wacom's low-end Bamboo Pen [wacom.com] ($69) tablet should be more than you need. Amazon has it for $60. [amazon.com] Combine it with Microsoft OneNote or similar and you'll have recreated the fabulous 2-buck pen-and-paper experience. Go you!

The pulse smart pen is far better. I tried the Wacom bluetooth tablet but the problem is that you cannot see what you write. If you use the Pulse Smartpen [smartpencentral.com] then it acts like a real pen - so you can see exactly what you have written - and as well as recording exactly what you wrote it records audio as well so you end up with a document that you can click on to hear what was being said at the time that you wrote that bit of text.

The only downside is that it needs special paper which you can buy in notebook form or which you can print yourself using a laser printer. The windows version has some extra software you can buy to perform OCR on your handwriting but since I have a Mac I have no idea how good it is. There is even an open SDK for you to develop your own applications for it but it unfortunately only supports Java.

There is another issue with the Pulse Smartpen: the software is a steaming piece of shit. For instance, if anybody draws a huge penis on the first page of your notebook, you'll stare at it until the end of the year, because you can't delete pages.

The question I don't understand is WHY. The quoted statement outline the end result pretty clearly. I understand slashdot loves to use fancy technology to solve simple problems, but sometimes simpler is better. I already have a HUGE set of properly formatted equations all nicely written out, it's called the Book.

Note taking, for me, was to summarize what the teacher said, in MY words so that I could understand it later. I just learn by writing it down, there were some classes that I never kept the notes. I'd grab what ever scratch paper was by the printers, write on it, and toss it after class. (Statics. F=0, how hard is it?). I still have quite a few of both textbooks AND notes for a class. I have the hard equations and then I have how I learned it. Heaven forbid ever become an engineer, where the teacher is drawing simply supported beams on the board, the teacher is drawing feedback control systems.

Anything worth writing is worth writing once. If someone already wrote it in the text book. Then that is good enough for me. In some classes we'd photocopy the problems out of the book, cut them out and paste them on the homework. It was better looking than my drawing and clearer than my handwriting... and I can guarantee I never made any transcribing errors.

Instantly digitized notes seem like they'd be great for classes where the content will never exist again outside of that class. Philosophy debates, taking notes as a reporter, etc. You're going to spend more of your time trying to figure out how to make that '2' go subscript of that '4' in the numerator with the summation block than you will learning the content. Put down the computer. Grab a good mechanical pencil and a $.50 notebook from walmart and quit worrying about it.

If you HAVE to have a digital copy. Take notes on something that can easily be separated into individual sheets (3 ring binder and 8x11s with 3 holes). When the semester is over take it to any decent multifunction machine, put it in the top and let it scan everything for you.

I've been using OneNote for a couple of years, and I'm pretty disgusted with it. Too complicated, too limited. too unreliable, too many "what were they thinking" gotchas.

Right now, I'm giving Evernote a try. Not as many snazzy features of OneNote, but the features it does have work well and are easy to access. And it's free, if you don't mind a few non-obnoxious ads. If it continues to bear the strain, I'm transferring all my data from OneNote and deleting the sucker.

Absolutely! I have students that take notes on computer, and I think it's a terrible idea. First there is the problem of equations. In the class I teach we introduce a lot of symbols, so even if you have a fast system you would have to find the symbols in a big list. By the time you do, you're probably behind.

Second, note taking is a tool which helps you learn the material better. Transcribing the notes later helps significantly more, because now you get to revisit the material with fresh eyes. Something that may have seemed obvious initially may seem less so when you transcribe them. Now you can go to the next lecture an ask questions from the previous class. (As a professor, I'm *very* impressed when students do this, because it proves to me that they did something other than drink beer between the end of the last class and the beginning of the next.)

Finally taking notes on a computer provides you with many distractions. I know lots of students who claim "I don't get distracted from using a computer", but then my grader or another student informs me the were surfing the web, reading email, IMing, etc. Save yourself from having to avoid these and just use paper.

As far as typing odd symbols goes, here's my.xmodmaprc for anyone who wants it. It lets me type in greek symbols, and a few other things, by making the caps lock (original function: worthless) into a new shift key:
! first set caps lock to be a group shift key
keycode 66 = Mode_switch

! Now set up all the keys: first two are the normal qwerty en_US keys, 3rd and 4th are greek characters (or others)
keysym a = a A Greek_alpha Greek_ALPHA
keysym b = b B Greek_beta Greek_BETA
keysym c = c C Greek_psi Greek

I used to hand out notes for my lectures, but then stopped doing it. Students fall asleep in class if there is no physical activity, and the act of note-taking is very important for keeping the brain engaged -- particularly in a mathematical class. When I first started at the University I was very idealistic and thought I was going to change the way teaching was done. The hard lesson was that there is a reason why professors use chalk and blackboard. It works.

Well, the one thing that always bugged me about math classes is that the practical aspects were few and far between. It was like doing nothing in English except diagram sentences, conjugate verbs, etc.

Pencil/paper and transcription. That way the knowlage is refreshed after the lecture and you hve a better chance of correcting what you took down if it was initially taken down in error because the content is fresh in your mind.

If you're just interested in organization and searching, I'd highly recommend the LiveScribe Pulse smartpen - all the smarts are in the pen, which isn't too expensive compared to a tablet, and you can buy the compatible notebooks cheaply. All your notes get backed up to your computer when you dock your pen, it does a great job searching for a specific piece of text. My handwriting is a disaster, and I have never seen a search fail so far - I believe that it actually uses the sequence of pen motions (not just OCR on the final result) and it can tolerate some of the letters being unreadable.
It has other features as well, such as recording audio (the mic has a decent gain) and syncing it with your notes. They also have an SDK and are launching an app store, so in the future you should be able to make good use of the ARM processor in the pen.

I agree. You should not be taking notes on the computer. It's much better to do it on paper and, if you really need it, digitize them later.
This coming from a former mathematical physics student, now teaching mathematical physics. So I do have (a lot of) experience with it.

Another problem with handwritten notes is that many people experience serious hand cramping after writing continuously for an hour. I could type for a week without getting tired; you don't have to tightly grip a keyboard. I stopped writing stuff by hand entirely back in junior high, with the exception of a couple of teachers who didn't like typed stuff. Handwriting is just too physically draining for what you get out of it. Pen and paper are for *short* notes to myself, marking up copy, etc. Everything else is 1s and 0s.

Handwriting is just too physically draining for what you get out of it. Pen and paper are for *short* notes to myself, marking up copy, etc. Everything else is 1s and 0s.

For fuck's sake. What do you think we used to do in olden days before there were laptop computers? I went through college, not only writing my notes in lectures with my bare hands but also copying them out neatly later with my bare hands.

There's this amazing thing with muscles, if you use them they get stronger.

I have been an engineer for 30 years and have tried over and over to take digital notes. I have never found an efficient solution. You're right - equations and drawings / sketches make digital note-taking a mess. OCR technology pukes on my handwriting.

totally agree.
The best editing software for equations I've ever seen is latex, and I suspect it's still too slow for taking notes in class.
There used to be these crazy pens that could capture notes (and doodles) to image files... But it'd probrably be easier just to scan them later, as it'd give you a chance to review them anyway.

Other solutions that solve poster's problem without answering his quesiton:

1. Memorize as you go.
2. Screw lecture, just watch Square One.
3. Have friend audio-record lectures then have other friend convert them to notes then photocopy friend's notes and use OCR.
4. Drop out of school.
5. Prove the Reimann Hypothesis and skip right to that PhD.
6. Hire a plant to continually ask inane questions during lecture, giving you more time to input those equations in LaTeX.
7. Code up a Math Module for Dragon Naturally speaking.
8. ???
9. Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all

I'm a graduate student in physics and my friend started using started using LyX to do class notes and even homework. I've used it too and still do for very math-heavy homework and so on. It's very readable compared to handwriting, you can cut and paste, and it's not significantly slower. I still do a lot of analysis on paper with a good fountain pen, but I always have to rewrite a final, legible version anyway, and LyX is very easy and my professors love it.

Apparently as of Snow Leopard, the touchpad can now do handwriting recognition. So you may already have all the tools you need with your MacBook. I've never tried this particular functionality, though it sounds cool.

I encountered this problem too during my last year and a half in uni, so I used a low-tech solution. When I needed to put an equation in my notes, I would type "See EQ. 1-1" and fill up a piece of paper with equations. Later on (that day or the next), while reviewing my notes I would look up the eq on my sheet and type it into my notes the correct way.

I was a math major not so long ago, and I used a tablet pc at the time... It worked fairly well, although I never digitized what I wrote down, and didn't really look into it either. I'm not sure you would get good results with a Wacom tablet though. I know another student in a class (computer, this time) I took tried that, and he could not even read what he wrote. So if you decide to try it, you may want to keep your receipt. Good luck.

I had this issue for years. Ultimately I never found anything within a factor of 5 for speed of simple pen and paper. The next best thing was LaTeX; with practice you can type that remarkably fast. (Especially if you pre-define macros relevant to whatever you're doing) The GUI-based solutions uniformly stank.

I've never found any system for digitizing handwritten equations; for a long time, my hope was that such software (preferably with LaTeX output) and a tablet would be a good solution. But the market for such things is small, and a few minutes of design work convinced me that implementing it was a lot more trouble than it would ever be worth.

Forget the computer for mathematics classes. You will never get as fast with any sort of computer technology as you will with paper. If you want to jot down a quick calculation, or more importantly, draw a diagram, paper and pencil are painless and easy, and as a result you'll spend more time focusing on what's really important: what the professor is saying and doing on the board.

I'm a math major just graduated and taking graduate courses in mathematics currently so I've had much experience

AMaya is the only one I've used. Doubt it would be fast enough for note taking though it outputs MathML so you can drop it straight in to HTML and a browser. It is open source so you can optimize it if you desire.

You know, I already have a touch tablet on my notebook, as many others do too. The problem is that the software is programmed to make it act as a mouse (and I also always carry a small wireless mouse with my notebook). So the ideal solution would seem to be a piece of software that lets one use this touch sensitive surface for what it really is rather than forcing it to be a mouse. Has no one written and released such software?

You have evaluate what this is really worth to you. You can learn just fine with notes you hand-wrote. Will all the effort you'd put into making this electronic really mean you'll learn the material in less time? And you're not seriously going to bring a Wacom tablet to class, are you? You'll look ridiculous.

If you really must, scan and OCR your (neatly) hand-written notes. You'll get enough of the words to be able to search for the concept you need later.

I used this in college, albeit not while I was attending a lecture. Still, you should be able to click the various special formula buttons at least as fast as some prof is either talking through slides or writing them on a board. By the way, it is also a good tool for checking whether or not you solved an equation correctly. I've used it up to and including multivariate calculus, so it should take you quite a ways. My memory of matrix algebra is kind of fuzzy so don't remember how good it was there, but

Installed linux on it: i got an Acer C112 i'm not using, battery's stuffed but the keyboard is almost brand-new, replaced it only a couple of months before getting a new one:)... but seriously, i'm not here to sell you my old laptop, but to recommend that you look up any 2nd hand smartphone or touchscreen PDA, and use the "drawing" program, simple as that.

you can then insert the images into your notes, afterwards. pay attention _do_ try to get a linux-based one: not only do my natural instincts abhor pro

livescribe.com sells the Pulse Smart Pen. It can also record the lecture while transcribing your handwriting. the best thing however, is to get last years notes, and bring it with you. then you can read along. professors usually have the same script year after year.

Firstly, the Mac has an incredibly rich simple character set. This is NOT coincidental, as Apple copied their editing capabilities from the publishing industry decades ago. E.g. in TextEdit type alt-b and you'll see a '' integral symbol (looks correct as I type it, hopefully the post wont change it). If you can learn these keyboard shortcuts (learning-curve arguments aside), you *may* be able to type these directly into your mac in class, BUT...
If you take notes by hand, then transcribe them into your mac using these short cuts, or simply via the Mac's Font (e.g. TextEdit --> commant-T) and characters (e.g. via the gear drop-down in the Font) pane, you're doing yourself a much bigger favor.

I took all of my notes throughout university (including engineering courses) using OpenOffice.org. The equation editor in OpenOffice is easy-to-learn, fast (as in, no mouse use required and the keystrokes are all sane), and the completed equations look great. (By default, there isn't a keyboard shortcut for inserting a new equation, so you'll need to manually assign one—I used Ctrl-Shift-F, if I remember correctly.

Your example would almost work as is; it would be entered as:

f_x (x) = int from -infinity to infinity f (x, y) dy

Or, if you prefer your parentheses to stretch (in case you have fractions inside, or what have you):

f_x left ( x right ) = int from -infinity to infinity f left ( x, y right ) dy

Either way, it comes out looking very nice. The one thing that takes some getting used to is that you need to make liberal use of whitespace (e.g. between f and the opening parenthesis of the function), otherwise things will occasionally come out looking a little strange. The best part is, when you don't know what you need to type for a particular symbol, you can select it from the menu and OO will insert the plaintext code, which makes it very easy to learn the code for new items.

My physics class turns in their labs digitally. Some of them have really struggled trying to insert equations. Some of them had scanned their notes and then cropped various equations out. Some had tried building equations via manual formatting supplemented via underlining and super/subscripting. To a person, they seem to hate MS Office's equation editor as it takes too long to point and click your way through (and if there's another way with their editor, enlighten me).

I second using OpenOffice.org to enter equations. I liked to take notes on the computer in classes that had much of any written text in the notes (I took notes in a notebook for calculus, statics/strengths, physics and such that had almost all equations as notes). Since I was an engineering major, just about every class had at least some equations as part of the notes and I could bang out equations pretty easy with the text math symbol input in OpenOffice.org Writer. One other neat trick is to do the Ctrl-S

I was disabled and taking notes was VERY slow for me if I tried writing. I used a word processor WP or MS Word (I don't remember which one) to take notes. I had a similar problem until I discovered that I could map an entire phrase into a single keystroke. For example: "ALT + CTRL + F " could be "f(X) = " You could even be more elaborate because certain phrases are used time and time again in lectures. My longest remapping was 20 characters. For different classes, I had completely different keystroke mappings. Just be careful not to remap the standard keystrokes.

This technique worked for me all though grad school. I also used a tape recorder (get the professors permission first) and reviewed my notes after class to make sure I got it all.

This is not the old Equation Editor 3.0 from Word 2003, which is a crippled version of MathType, but rather a brand new equation facility in Word 2007, which is also the basis for the new equation support in the OneNote 2010 beta another poster has referred to.

The Word 2007 equation editor supports a "linear format" for completely keyboard-based input, which is based on TeX-like commands like "\sum" and "\int" and is documented in this Unicode technical note:
Unicode Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics [unicode.org]

I've been using this for my math classes since last semester, with great success. Once you master the linear format, it's not difficult to keep up if you have a reasonable typing rate to begin with.

[This is a non-answer to your question. But it's a good non-answer if my success and student and teacher is any measure.]

Don't take notes in class. Seriously. I've forbidden note taking in some of my classes. I hand out copies of material not in the book. But when I lecture, I do so with the intention that what I say be listened and paid attention to. If someone's trying to write what I say, their attention and working memory is so divided that they can't be picking up much of anything.

This is especially true for maths. Of what purpose is it for you to have to watch someone write out equations? Of what purpose to write them down at the same time? Is the content of so little importance that they can waste their time and yours with speed writing exercises? The writing/rewriting is important for memory. That being so, why tax the memory with the process, reducing the result?

Ask your instructors for copies of their class notes. Explain why. If they feel it's somehow cheating, ask to record their lecture. If they're not saying the equations out loud, record in video. Then whether paper copies, audio or video, transcribe. More than once if need be. Work with them on this. It'll be to everyone's benefit. If they can't believe that, prove it by recording a class with them writing stuff as usual and people copying, and calculate how much more time it takes for them to write, you to write, you to ask what that wiggly thing is, them to tell you, them to write, them to ask if everyone is caught up, on and on; vs. hand out a paper copy, them lecture, you listen (and add just tiny clarifications if necessary on their notes).

I really am serious about this, and pushing this agenda has made me a favorite of students (who get better grades; I've tracked that too) but gotten me all kids of grief from other instructors. They see the process as one of confrontation, forcing students to do things a certain way and any other is 'cheating', or could be used for cheating, and frankly very little rational explanations are forthcoming. I picked it up from instructors who were more concerned their students learn than jump through hoops like speed writing as the sole means to collect material covered in class. I hated hoops as a student and refused to use them as a teacher. Instructors that can't get away from hoops are using them as a crutch. Help them learn to do better.

If find that the process of writing down class notes is what (a) keeps my mind focused on the lecture and (b) aids in review when I have the notes in _my_ order with my side notes. I've taken classes lately with professors using your method (their notes, sometimes with blanks to simplify class participation) - and it didn't "stick." Sure, I did well, but it was all short term memory - in a year the knowledge was nearly as foreign as if I hadn't taken it.

It sounds more like you prefer to provide more material than normally covered, and that's fine. I'd prefer to cover a little less and have it stick with me. As for recording notes and recopying later - I'll admit I'm a bad student. My time is limited and the hour I spend in a lecture is the hour I devote to that material - I don't want to spend an extra 1-2 hours relistening to a lecture - it wastes my time if I've done the in-class routinge correctly. Sample problems (aka homework) cements the lesson and identifies areas I don't understand so I can review them at the next opportunity.

What really cements the knowledge are the tests where I get to use a formula/summary sheet (preferably multiple for later, cumulative exams). I have notes from a decade ago that I use regularly in my office because I copied carefully in class, then when studying for the exams prepared "summary" sheets. Those sheets are - to this day - my professional references. A quick glance for the right formula, back to the notes I took (with my side points) if it's been a while, and into the textbook if I need to really brush up or have to expand on a subject.

Of course, this is primarily for engineering; math can be different, as can other topics.

I would drop any class you did that in and ensure that I reward you with a terrible recommendation and report, if I was your dean I would fire you. I learn best by writing what is said, take away my ability to write and I won't learn it all. Your policy is beyond stupid because everyone learns differently. By forcing everyone to learn the way you learn, or the way you believe people should learn, you are guaranteeing that a minority of your classes won't learn anything. You should rethink your insistence that you know how to learn better than the students you are teaching because not only is your policy downright discriminatory for those with learning disorders such as dyslexia, but your arrogant belief that you know better demonstrates a superiority complex that's prevalent in higher education and a first order indicator of a bad teacher.

Wow. I hope I am making the mistake of responding to a troll, because if you genuinely believe what you wrote, you are a sad sad person. People with dyslexia aren't "slow" and they certainly aren't what you wanted to imply, which is stupid. They have a neurological condition to affects their ability to visually process information -- a condition which, in fact, they can overcome by training themselves to compensate. I teach, and I have taught dyslexics as well as non-dyslexics. You know which group was

I once took a class in AI in which the professor showed us a film from the late 1960's that demonstrated just such a tool. You wrote an equation in math notation with a light-pen (or something similar) on to a screen, and it translated your marks (pen movements) into an internal representation and then displayed a formatted version on the screen. (Professor Blackwell, I think was his name, and he worked on part of that project before teaching.)

If it could be done for a research project in the late 60's, then surely it's still technically possible and could probably do better. It's amazing that much of the UI technology we take for granted now existed in the 60's (as expensive research projects). Graphical GUI's, dragging, mice, light-pens, stroke character recognition, etc. Sutherland's great work included. Much of it was funded by the military for use in radar analysis, interactive flight planning, etc. Xerox extended these by using the overlapping paper metaphor in the 70's.

I once took a class in AI in which the professor showed us a film from the late 1960's that demonstrated just such a tool. You wrote an equation in math notation with a light-pen (or something similar) on to a screen, and it translated your marks (pen movements) into an internal representation and then displayed a formatted version on the screen.

If it could be done for a research project in the late 60's, then surely it's still technically possible and could probably do better.

I remember that project. As I recall, it was all well and good up to the moment the software went sentient and tried to kill the researchers. DARPA dropped funding and began a campaign to convince everyone that AI would never be practical.

Hi, I'm a physics professor. I say, take your notes on paper. Math is the most computer-incompatible writing system ever designed. You'll never ever be able to type equations fast enough to keep up with me on the blackboard.

And even if you manage to find a math entry system that's fast enough, it won't help you with the diagrams, graphs, and sketches.

Of course, I don't practice what I preach: my own lecture notes are in text files. But that's because to me, "block ramp friction mu=0.2, 1 kg 30deg 1m long, find final v. U=4.9 Wf=1.7 v=2.5" is a complete set of notes for a 20-minute segment of lecture.

Oh, also: write in pencil. I guarantee you that whenever you bring a pen, I will spend the entire lecture correcting minor mistakes by erasing with the heel of my hand, changing variable notations, and editing diagrams and drawings halfway through working a problem.

TeX-based notes in many math classes is very doable. I got to the point during my math degree that I could type equations way faster than the professor could write in the board. I still type faster than I write on the board when I teach. Functional analysis and algebra were the best for typewritten notes; numerical analysis was the worst due to the number of matrices.

TeX-based notes in a physics class (especially less theoretical ones) is

- I hate writing, and always have and avoid it wherever possible - it hurts my hand and my handwriting is awful.- I was using computers way before anyone else in my school, I even took some of the lessons that I was supposed to be taught in (the teacher found it easier that way).- I went to university to study Mathematics and Computing and had already had five years (at least) of proper exposure to things like Maple, Matlab, etc. (I was doing my A-level projects in Maple when nobody else, including my teachers, had even heard of it) through my brother who attended the same university.

Every single mathematics-based lecture, for three entire years, I hand-wrote notes. It's the only sensible way to do so. There isn't a notation or shorthand that can cope with rapidly sketching down formulae (especially integrals, sums of series, etc.) and diagrams. In some subjects, a simple diagram showing an angle, or a particular piece of geometry is invaluable and could takes hours to reproduce properly on a computer. I know, because for the last ten years, I've worked for tuition centres, state and private schools and I'm often asked to professionally produce an electronic version of their course materials (99% of the time mathematics because that's my speciality).

Don't waste your time, memory, money and brainpower - just take pad and pen, or use a touchscreen/tablet PC if you *insist* on using a computer. When you're taking notes the last thing you want to be doing is taking down the mathematics like it's some kind of gospel. There will be a million books on the subject where you can find the nuts and bolts of the process, but if you lose that "feel" of the mathematics that you can only get by watching someone apply it in front of your eyes, you'll never truly understand it.

The point of a lecture is to demonstrate and explain and give opportunity for questions (yes, ask questions... why does *nobody* ask questions in lectures? It isn't forbidden, just don't waste everyone's time with trivialities!), you learn more in a ten minute lecture on a particular subject than you ever will by studying the materials from that lecture. *Being* there, with the enthusiastic tutor, and the commentary they give, is what makes the mathematics explain itself. Everything else is just paper-based memoranda of that lecture. Someone, somewhere will be selling notes from that lecture. I've taken copies of complete stranger's notes (with their permission) when I missed lectures for reasons beyond my control. Notes are memory-aids only. Wasting an immense amount of time recording them in such a fashion is to focus on the aesthetics of the tool, not the job you're doing with that tool. All you're actually doing is writing the book that your lecturer learned from, you're not learning anything, and doing so at great expense. Your concentration should be on the mathematics happening in front of you, not the paper in your hand or the computer under your fingers.

I often just sat in awe when I was in a lecture and watched the mathematics unfold in front of me, sketching only notes on the specifics.

Scribble notes. If you have special needs, ask to video/record the lectures or for the lecturers to provide assistance afterwards (and complain to the highest authorities if they don't let you). Then, study, study, study from your notes, your memory, your skills, and the vast wealth of materials on every subject imaginable. Anyone can find out how to apply equation X to input Y, or read a book on graph theory or calculus, but advanced mathematics is more about the patterns and the art of being able to discover, use and apply that knowledge, not copy from rote from two-year-old notes.

I graduated. Not a great grade but I was hitting a wall in my abilities in even the first year, a wall I've never been able to pass in the years since. Some courses ran like water through my sieve of a brain, and some were just second nature (and still are). But at no point did the actual taking of my notes interfere with

I used Infty Editor in my classes - I think it's based on LaTeX but, it was pretty quick. I didn't use it to take notes in realtime though, so I can't tell you how successful that would be. http://www.inftyproject.org/en/software.html [inftyproject.org]

What about getting a small, good quality webcam, preferably with a zoom feature? When your professor writes out an equation, point the camera at it, take a quick screen capture, and paste it into your notes.

Get an inexpensive drawing tablet, turn on Ink in OSX (10.5 and up; at: System Preferences: but note that the preference pane will not show unless you have a graphics tablet plugged in). Write the formulas on the tablet.

You can take screenshots (Command-Option-3 full screen; Command-Option-4 select an area to capture) to save what you write/draw and use Ink's character recognition to convert it to formulas with a check via the saved screenshots to make sure it didn't make errors. You can turn the character recognition off or on anytime via the Ink preference pane.You will want to enable the Character Palette (at: System Preferences: Keyboard & Mouse) so you have quick access to the mathematical symbols in your chosen fonts for your saved notes.

I love how everyone here is telling you to just pencil and paper. For the past 7 years (through both college and high school), I have taken all of my math notes in Mathematica. Every symbol, even the most esoteric ones, is at most four or five keystrokes. For example, an integral like integral x=0 to inf (x^2)/xbar is quick to enter:

it's really quick to type, and you'll quickly learn the keystrokes from the character palette. I haven't taken a single note on paper in any of my math classes since about sophomore year of high school.